Keeble McFarlane

There are many things about our little country which, especially in the past few years, have brought nothing but shame. However, there are also many shining examples of talent, brains, a sense of connection to one's roots, and just sheer goodness.

Louise Bennett-Coverly, who said goodbye on Wednesday to Auntie Roachie and the dozens of characters who populated her head, was one of those shining examples. She never had a lot of money, although she lived comfortably.

She was never the best manager of her affairs, and for many years she never saw a penny of royalties from the many editions of her work. It was only in the last few years, because of the urging and intervention of a persistent friend, that she began to receive long overdue royalties.

Money was not her main motive force - rather, she lived to perform, as well as to inform. Inquisitive about the ways her fellow countrywomen and men behaved and expressed themselves, she observed, studied, parsed and dissected, and came out with poetic distillations of the words and actions she had noted. At a time when to speak as the ordinary folk did was frowned upon by the people who held social power, Louise Bennett unabashedly took their stories, distilled them and presented the results in highly entertaining form to a public unaccustomed to this form of art.

At first, people didn't quite know what to make of her rhyming, sly, humorous, rhythmic verses discussing common situations, attitudes and behaviours. She believed that the vernacular - call it patois, bad English, or whatever the upper-crust wannabes felt - was a perfectly valid mode of expression right up there along with Cockney, Geordie, Scouss, American Creole, hillbilly or southern drawl.

And along with her stage partner of many, many years - Ranny Williams - Miss Lou, as she became known to one and all, managed to persuade the majority of her fellow Jamaicans to accept the dialect.

She was struck by the magic of the stage at an early age, and her talents took her to England on a drama scholarship. While there, she worked for the BBC, which curiously, while the leading bastion of Oxford-accented English, also served as a platform for other versions of the language.

She wrote poetry, she wrote stories, she synthesised the folklore of her people and presented them in a palatable, digestible form. She made records, and encouraged others to dig up and bring to life the old songs, stories and games of our collective communal past.

She and Ranny became the stars of the annual Christmas pantomime put on by the Little Theatre Movement in the 1940s. Actually, the recurring star, year in and year out, was one of the folklore figures the pair had identified from our African slave heritage - the versatile, cunning, Protean and multi-lived Anancy.

He was always trying to put one over on those he met, would appear to have gone a little too far each time, and then saved his bacon by a quirk of fortune. (I often think Anancy should be the patron saint of Jamaica.)

Both of them found radio - Miss Lou in England and Ranny in Jamaica. He did commercial shows on the early RJR - performing many episodes live in the studio. Miss Lou later came into her own on the medium with her five-minute sermonettes such as the famous Miss Lou's Views.

She would discuss current events and put forward her take on those events in the words of the dominating, all-knowing Aunty Roachie. Television beckoned, with the children's show Ring Ding. She lectured in schools and universities about the importance of dialect.

Miss Lou found a life-long partner in the man who found her professionally - Eric Coverly. The first time I saw them together was in 1955, the tercentenary of the British occupation of the island after the Spanish, who were the first Europeans to come. They starred in a bandwagon which toured the island presenting a pageant celebrating that history. I saw the show in Black River, with an unforgettable performance of It Was Under The Coconut Tree with Miss Lou and Maas Eric.

I didn't meet Miss Lou until I worked at JBC in the early 1960s, when she and Ranny held a live audience at the Carib Theatre in Cross Roads and a much larger one on the radio in thrall with their antics every Wednesday night in The Lou and Ranny Show.

We would run into each other from time to time, both at JBC and later at RJR, until I moved to Canada in 1970. She followed about 20 years ago, after Eric's health had become seriously compromised and he needed constant medical supervision. I recall Eric telling me once he knew the insides of a whole string of hospitals from his numerous visits.

Another time, shortly after he had returned home from a bout of treatment, he was so happy to see visitors even though he had spent most of the day lying down. He almost literally came alive, making sure we were comfortable and plying us with refreshments.

A few years ago, they moved to a very comfortable high-rise condo about two kilometres from my home in the Toronto suburb of Scarborough, and I recall one memorable visit there about six years ago on Miss Lou's 80th birthday. The apartment was crammed with friends and well-wishers. Again, this was an occasion when both rose above their afflictions, and came alive in the presence of a hundred-plus friendly faces.

Then came the inevitable day when Maas Eric caved in to his ailments. As people trickled in for the first viewing at the funeral home, Miss Lou regaled us with the story about how she looked at him in the coffin and felt something was wrong.
'This don't look like Rico,' she exclaimed, using her preferred diminutive form of his name. It was some time before she figured out that they had dressed him in a regular necktie, which he never wore. Only when they replaced it with his trademark bowtie did she feel he looked as he should.
Along with everyone else, I will miss the lady, both in her public and private personas.

But I will always marvel at the irony that all of those three giants - Ranny, Maas Eric and Miss Lou - whose lives were so intermingled in discovering, defining, exposing and explaining the popular culture of their country, ended their lives in faraway Toronto.

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